Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#231

Post by izacus » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:10 PM UTC

narnarpapadaddy wrote: post #145

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #125

I had to stop reading halfway through to respond. > In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species. Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker? > We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary. Th…

> This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny. The point he’s trying to make, as I understand it, is that states adapt. They don’t just throw up their hands and say “guess we can’t do anything about that encrypted traffic.” The response to distributed kinetic kill capability in the US, for example, is for police to become more militarized and treat every encounter as a pot…

Expecting that governments won't respond to software which is tailored to prevent them from investigating crimes (e.g. Signal's primary marketing is all about preventing government access to chats) was so utterly naive that only privileged techbros could make it up.

Other people understand that picking a fight with someone will result in a fight.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#232

Post by luipugs » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:20 PM UTC

crabbone wrote: post #223

hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

This is what usually happens if you let incompetent people make design decision: they stay with the first and worst version forever. Right now I'm in the process of leaving a company where this happened over and over again. The company's product and design aspects were always neglected in this specific way: whenever a problem was discovered its solution was assigned to whoever would write the code to solve it. That's…

I would have assumed code reviews would have sussed out those issues earlier in the cycle?

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#233

Post by BirAdam » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

andrekandre wrote: post #204

dzonga wrote: post #140

I think the author is missing a layer of abstraction. yeah - once regulators come into play - the private ecosystems take over. discord is already a precursor to this. the era of mass public social networks will come to the end. next it will be just private networks of individuals. likely the won't interact. how the dynamics play out - I don't know - but if you study history - you will know what behaviors will happen…

> the era of mass public social networks will come to the end. its just my unsubstantiated guess, but i feel like this is the end-goal of these age-verification laws... but if that were true, what i don't understand is why don't they just go after the business model itself legal-wise instead of indirectly with age-verification...

The owners of the social networks are billionaires with great lawyers and lobbyists on staff. They get politicians to introduce bills pushing the responsibility to the OS instead of the social network.

Of course, I am not sure why anyone trusts the global elite after JE. Telling any system the age of a user could be more harmful to that user than the supposed harm of the software itself.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#234

Post by pietervdvn » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #213

lysace wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: not MD5 itself. It was created in 1991 by Ron Rivest. (It is my experience that knowledge of these things isn't as widely distributed as one might hope.) I first came across it in 1995/1996: Wow, what a magical tool for backend web stuff! I used it for everything.

is the difference between MD5 and MD5crypt the same as between Java and Javascript or are they actually related somehow?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(C)#MD5-based_scheme

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#235

Post by Joker_vD » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:37 PM UTC

elric wrote: post #100

r_lee wrote: post #56

> my personal guess is that the opportunities for anonymity on the Internet will shrink until mothers no longer are forced to have “the talk” when their daughters get their first mobile phone. As the parent of a daughter, I am totally on board with that. depends on the age but.. they've probably discovered all kinds of shit already or heard about it from others

I don't think he was talking about "the birds and the bees"-talk, but about the "some random men will send you unsollicited dick pics just because you're a girl"-talk.

A talk like this, but broader and including all kinds of human communications/interactions in general (including AFK/off-line interactions), will still be needed to happen between a girl and the girl's parents in the foreseeable future, due to the basics of human nature; it may as well include the online behaviour.

After all, there is a reason why "some random women will send you unsolicited vag pics just because you're a buy"-talk doesn't need to happen with boys.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#236

Post by Joker_vD » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #231

narnarpapadaddy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny. The point he’s trying to make, as I understand it, is that states adapt. They don’t just throw up their hands and say “guess we can’t do anything about that encrypted traffic.” The response to distributed kinetic kill capability in the US, for example, is for police to become more militarized and treat every encounter as a pot…

Expecting that governments won't respond to software which is tailored to prevent them from investigating crimes (e.g. Signal's primary marketing is all about preventing government access to chats) was so utterly naive that only privileged techbros could make it up. Other people understand that picking a fight with someone will result in a fight.

How did the police in XIX and XX century even managed to investigate the crimes without having access to the records of criminals' communications, and with way worse forensics available? No, seriously, how?

One of the things they did is they investigated metadata: you know, witnesses who saw what people walked around? Today we have way more of such data, readily available for them, plus ubiquitous CCTV and the like. That's not enough, apparently? Also, the police used to employ informants among the criminals themselves, and even implant the cover agents. Apparently, this nowadays is too expensive/bothersome, compared to running a global search for the keywords in the text messages and the transcripts of all voice messages sent in the country during the last month.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#237

Post by armchairhacker » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

saghm wrote: post #137

armchairhacker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Age restriction" can be implemented where stock devices are completely unrestricted. For example, just with better parental controls and education: children don't have access to property, so the parent takes their device and enables the parental controls, but you own your device so leave them disabled. And this wouldn't affect Linux or FOSS: on a child's device their parent installs either a proprietary OS or a FOSS…

That's not what the comment I responded to was proposing: > Maybe even enable age restrictions by default, block replacing the OS or the firmware, and only allow it once the age was confirmed. Having an extra hurdle before installing Linux would be an awful secondary effect for this type of regulation independent of whether the check itself is already objectionable (which I always obviously think it is, although obvi…

You're right. I don't see why a device would be age restricted by default, when practically always an adult has first access (too expensive)

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#238

Post by MrDresden » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

> "And before you ask: Yes, I’m laying this one squarely down before (and partly on the toes of) the tech bros: We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary."

It is getting mighty tiring to be continuously put in the tech bro libertarian camp just because of my sex, choice of occupation and stance on privacy.

That being said I don't see it as being impossible for a privacy preserving system to be put into place where the central certificate authority (state) offers a way of authenticating the age of the individual without leaking further information, and the client not offering up details about what is being viewed.

For example Meta wants to authenticate a users age and simply receives a boolean response indicating that they are of legal age or not, without anything more.

This could be implemented quite easily in some European countries that already use government issued electronic authentication systems (Auðkenni in Iceland and DigiD in the Netherlands spring to mind).

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#239

Post by mr_toad » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

> If you're going to assign a relatively medium talent engineer to solve a problem, it's cheaper to let them solve it twice, maybe even three times, than it is to try to figure out what the right solution is before touching a keyboard.

What’s even worse is when a lot of talented people spend a lot of time planning a solution on paper which turns out not to be workable in practice, and then they throw good money after bad trying to get the unworkable solution to work, rather than admitting they were wrong.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#240

Post by mr_toad » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #169

hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them. I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone. They are still using ES…

> This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them.

This is often because no thought was put into making decisions reversible. Version control, CI/CD, virtualization for example can make it easier to reverse decisions and make it faster and easier to replace bad designs.